Month: August 2003

Ebuyer hassle ebuyerdotcon.

After my dreadful experiences with ebuyer, I sent an email to ebuyerdotcon with details. Ebuyer have now sent a solicitors letter to ebuyerdotcon asking him to cease and desist on his domain name and complaints. It’s interesting that this came to light this weekend as there has been a lot of news over this week about the rights of bloggers in the US to give their opinion under Freedom of Speech, and also not to get sued for libel either. Wired posted about this last Tuesday. Unfortunately this blog is based in the UK, but I think that ebuyer would have a major problem if they tried to take this any further. After all, they don’t really want all their disappointed customers brought in as witnesses do they?

Temporary emails.

If you’ve ever needed to give an email to a website that you don’t trust just to download a file or register on a bulletin board then there are several options. I’ve already covered SpamGourmet which has emails that hides the email and times out after a certain number of emails received at the address, spammotel which provides random email address’s to mask your real address, and I discovered a new one called mailinator where you can pick an address at random and a mailbox is created automatically at the mailinator domain but *anyone* can access the mailbox so treat it as a throwaway, insecure address

No more 192 from sunday

BT’s 192 closes on Sunday which means there will be hundreds of people who have no idea how to find out Directory Enquiries. Apparently there are about 17 different companies now providing this service, all beginning 118, all charging by the minute (a REAL incentive for them to provide a quick service – I don’t think) and all charging using different mechanisms such as per second, per minute, minimum charge plus per second, etc.) To aid the confused, BBC news has a page explaining the new 118 options

AVG Automatic Updates

I fired up Kristen’s laptop which has AVG on it and discovered that it hadn’t actually updated the virus definitions for a month as for some weird reason I had it set to update at 6.30 am! Seeing as though the laptop is not actually on then it hadn’t updated. A quick search in google and I realised that it is possible to run the AVG auto update by running “c:\program files\grisoft\avg6 \avginet.exe” /norm
Bundle this with sleep.exe saved into the windows directory, pop it into the startup folder and as the laptop is permanently connected to the internet, updates every time the machine is booted up (a bit of a pain if this is more than once a day but the pain is better than the pain of a virus infection)